Last year
in Detroit, Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) Local 334 was
forced to merge with another LIUNA local. Its passing, which went largely
unnoticed by the Detroit media, illustrates — and to some extent explains —
the decline of unions in Michigan and the country as a whole. In its final
years Local 334 had a turbulent history of overturned elections, fraud and
unfair labor practices. Membership, which stood at 2,300 in 1999, fell to 1,200
when LIUNA’s international office called for Local 334 to merge with nearby
Local 1191.

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Local
334’s members performed a wide range of tasks on construction sites in the
Detroit area: "The men and women of LIUNA do the hard, dangerous and sometimes
dirty work of building our countries," is how LIUNA’s
Web site describes it. Unlike most unions, members of LIUNA and other
construction industry unions do not work for a single employer; rather they move
from job to job among various contractors who hire workers as needed for
construction projects. The local itself ran a "hiring hall," which assigned
workers to job sites, but also allowed its members to find work on their own.

That
hiring hall became the subject of a long-running lawsuit that Local 334
eventually lost. According to an opinion released by the Sixth Circuit Court of
Appeals, a contractor called Local 334 just prior to Labor Day 2002 to get
laborers for a project on Zug Island. When the local failed to respond, the
contractor looked for workers on his own and found six — at least five of whom
were Local 334 members. Although the local had allowed this sort of thing in the
past, this time the local’s business manager balked and had the six laborers
fired. The workers filed an unfair labor practice with the National Labor
Relations Board and the NLRB eventually found in their favor. Local 334 appealed
that decision in the federal courts but their appeal was denied in April 2007.

Financial
disclosure forms filed by Local 334 with the Department of Labor showed that the
union was forced to pay $12,500 to each of the six laborers. The disclosure
forms do not indicate the legal costs incurred by the union as it pursued the
appeal.

The
hiring hall lawsuit might well have been the coup de grace for Local 334;
the same financial reports indicate that the day after making the $75,000
payment ordered by the NLRB, Local 334 transferred all its assets to LIUNA Local
1191. But Local 334 had more than its fair share of problems prior to that.

Documents
from LIUNA’s international headquarters obtained by Laborers for Justice
indicate that Local 334 was forced to re-run officer elections in 1999 and 2002.
According to a LIUNA investigation report, in 1999 incumbent officers of Local
334 used more than $30,000 from the union trust fund to have 1,500 gym bags made
with the officers’ names on them. These gym bags were then passed out to Local
334 members. LIUNA’s investigator found that these bags could "only be viewed as
a campaign tactic" that could not be bought with union trust funds and ordered a
re-run of the election. If anything the 2002 election was even more contentious,
with LIUNA’s own investigator finding that voters were not verified properly,
that job referrals were made improperly to influence votes, and that both sides
campaigned in the voting area in violation of LIUNA’s election rules. Once again
the results were set aside and a new election ordered.

Finally,
Wayne County sheriff’s deputies recently arrested three persons, and are still
looking for three others, who are suspected of having bilked more than $90,000
from Local 334’s pension fund by forging disability letters from the Social
Security Administration.

Union
proponents will argue that workers always benefit from union representation,
which is why they insist that workers must pay union dues or fees. But the
decline and fall of Laborers Local 334 shows that this is naïve. For at least
eight years the local was punished for unfair labor practices, divided by
internal election violations and victimized by fraud. The costs of all of this
fell on Local 334’s members, who were
obligated to pay for Local 334’s numerous failings if they wanted to work.

Paul Kersey is
director of labor policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research
and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint
in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center
are properly cited.